With its ales, dartboards, Chelsea FC memorabilia and replica-kitted fans avidly watching the World Cup on an array of screens, the Brewery Tap could be anywhere in west London.

But the pub is in downtown Houston, Texas, with the languid Buffalo Bayou just to the rear and the skyscraping headquarters of oil and gas corporations leering over its entrance.

Clogged with expats who suffer through England games, the Tap has also become a gathering place for Americans who are discovering in ever-growing numbers that US matches can deliver the same kind of patriotic, communal big-event experience normally associated with the Super Bowl.

There is nothing new in fans across America uniting to watch and talk about the World Cup, but anecdotal evidence and television ratings suggest that they are doing so now more than ever. And that means this tournament is another step forward on the sport’s arduous trudge towards the mainstream.

“There’s definitely a lot more interest in it,” said the 52-year-old manager, Philip Carvell, standing behind the bar just to the left of a wall-mounted Cambridge City FC scarf and a sign promoting Dry Blackthorn cider. Originally from Worcestershire, he moved to the US in 1987 and has been running the pub since 2001. He cited the modest time difference with Brazil as one reason why this tournament is attracting more customers compared with previous World Cups.

Another factor: the growing enthusiasm of locals. “There are definitely more Americans,” he said. “We now have an official Chelsea supporters club – we get good crowds for that and a lot of those kids are Americans.”

Chris Cassidy, a 25-year-old real estate agent from Houston, was at the pub early on Sunday and planned to watch the US play Portugal with a group of friends. “[People] have definitely been interested, but this is definitely the pinnacle of interest that I’ve seen,” he said.

Cassidy wanted to watch the game in the bar for “the atmosphere, especially in a game where everybody is pretty much rooting for one team … it’s gotten bigger. It’s gotten to at least as big as [college basketball’s] March Madness.”

Across town, pickup trucks crawled through busy roads and parking lots were full even an hour before kick-off in blocks around the small cluster of bars next to BBVA Compass Stadium, the two-year-old home of Major League Soccer’s Houston Dynamo.

Hundreds of fans mustered in a narrow pedestrianised street to watch the US’s 2-2 draw with Portugal on a giant screen, while a vast sports bar, Lucky’s, was crammed to capacity with fans in red, white and blue, chanting “When The Yanks Go Marching In” to the tune of the gospel hymn, as well as the staple, “U-S-A! U-S-A!” and the in-vogue slogan, “I Believe That We Will Win.” Servers ferrying Texas-sized plates of nachos tried to negotiate the crowds and a floor that glistened with beer and sweat.

To judge from the numbers and the mood, the casual onlooker might have concluded the occasion was a late-round knockout match, some sort of historic moment for US soccer, not merely the team’s second group game.

The Chicago Tribune reported that an estimated 20,000 people attended a downtown viewing party. It quickly became full and some were so desperate to get in that they hopped over a fence and were caught and handcuffed.

'The sport was seen as less than masculine'

“When the [basketball] Dream Team plays in the Olympics, people aren’t in American flag bandanas, they don’t paint their faces in the Stars and Stripes. This has become a way to flex your patriotic muscle,” said Michael J Agovino, author of The Soccer Diaries: An American’s Thirty-Year Pursuit of the International Game.

“I came to the sport in 1982 and I was made fun of. The sport was seen as less than masculine, it was seen as un-American, you were kind of a weirdo or outsider if you were into soccer… To see these scenes around the US is incredible.

“There are still pockets where there are holdouts; Nascar country, the south, for instance. One of my thoughts is that it’s really gained momentum during the last 10 years, during the Bush-Cheney era among a certain educated class – just to show that ‘we’re not into kind of meatheaded, American sports, but we’re more international and soccer’s this great international game with all this great political subtext’.”

Nick Mathews, the sports editor of the Houston Chronicle, said that he was not a football fan growing up in central Illinois but the atmosphere last year when Mexico played Nigeria in front of 62,107 people in Houston’s NFL stadium helped trigger his interest.

“It’s now on a bucket list of mine to go to a World Cup before my career’s over, or even just as a fan. It’s a special event,” the 34-year-old said. “We’re going to have at least a World Cup presence on the cover virtually every day until July 13, especially when the US and Mexico are playing.

“Our job is to either make the news through investigative reporting or to cover the news we think people are talking about. If you go out to dinner or just go to the grocery store and bump into somebody it seems like everybody’s talking about the World Cup right now, so we’re certainly playing to what I think our audience is interested in.”

Mathews said he gave a lecture to teenagers last week. “I asked them how many people were interested in the World Cup and about four out of maybe twenty raised their hands, maybe a little bit more. I asked them how many had friends who are interested in the World Cup and everybody raised their hands. It’s one of those things where people are paying enough attention to the World Cup because they know that friends and family are interested as well,” he said.

Josh Chetwynd, a Denver-based writer and broadcaster, was born in London but grew up in the US. He lived in England for most of the previous decade. “It’s a broad statement, but Americans in their sports are not quite as tribal as Europeans, so to me that’s the reason why you’re never going to have soccer as popular in the US as elsewhere in the world,” he said.

“If you want to be socially integrated living in England you would have to at least be marginally literate in the Premier League. It’s what guys talk about. It’s part of the culture, and something I wanted to be part of. After I moved there, the first question I had was ‘who do you support, or who are you going to support?’ If you move to America it’s not like that, it’s not, ‘who’s going to be your baseball team? Who’s going to be your [American] football team?’”

Chetwynd thinks the trend is cyclical. “To me it’s very similar to the Olympics. When it’s going on you’re very interested, very into it particularly if your team’s doing well, in bobsleigh, curling, or whatever it is. You get very engrossed in it and maybe there’s a little bit of echo – when it’s over, where you’re still kind of interested in curling, or bobsleigh. But that tends to dissipate unless there’s something foundational in front of you on a regular basis,” he said.

“Does MLS serve that purpose? Can you get excited enough about European soccer watching at odd hours on a Saturday or Sunday morning? It’s possible; it’s exciting to watch the English Premier League, and I think it will bring in people, but will it be pervasive enough to make it a comparative sport to the big four north American sports? I’m just not certain. Not certain that until you have the highest level of football in the United States it can rise to that level.”

'We play soccer in people's home markets'

MLS is working on that goal, acutely aware that being a soccer fan in America does not necessarily mean being a fan of American soccer. While the league is adding clubs and some are spending heavily to woo star players, it is simple for television viewers to catch live action from the best European competitions and be fans of Real Madrid rather than Real Salt Lake. MLS television ratings remain low and more Americans watch England’s Premier League.

“We’ve always been a firm believer in the theory that a rising tide lifts all boats,” said Dan Courtemanche, MLS executive vice-president of communications. “Studies show there are more than 70 million adult soccer fans in the United States. They’re not all fans of Major League Soccer clubs yet.

“It starts with the players. During the past 12 months, our owners made some significant commitments to sign players who we describe as difference-makers, guys that really raise the quality of our games. The spine of the US team is really made up of MLS players.

“Our marketing campaign this year was 'For Club and Country', connecting these players who play for their country on the world stage with their MLS club … Coming out of the World Cup our message is going to be: we play soccer in people’s home markets in great stadiums with elite players, guys like Clint Dempsey, Michael Bradley, Tim Cahill.”

Major companies have embraced the World Cup as a social media marketing opportunity, while MLS has worked closely with the US Soccer Federation to encourage established mainstream media and influential figures to discuss the tournament and generate buzz – from supplying scarves to CNN anchors to vice-president Joe Biden visiting the US locker room after their win over Ghana.

Ratings suggest that about a quarter of the UK’s population watched England lose to Italy in a match that kicked off at 11pm in Britain. That was an average 78% of the UK’s late-night television audience. The US triumph over Ghana, which started at 6pm on the east coast, enjoyed a record soccer audience on ESPN yet was viewed by roughly one in 18 Americans, with Washington DC the top market.

Veteran football fans often combine a disdain of bandwagon-jumping newcomers with an evangelical certainty of the sport’s all-consuming importance. This quasi-religious conviction, allied with football’s pervasive cultural influence in almost every country on the planet, gives attempts to boost football in the US a sense of impatience and bafflement about the country’s failure to see the light. But a truly deep conversion, from awareness to enthusiasm to obsession, requires time.

“It’s been really small baby steps every four-year cycle,” said Agovino. “It wasn’t just one thing. It wasn’t just David Beckham, it wasn’t just Landon [Donovan’s crucial goal against Algeria] four years ago, it wasn’t ’02 when the US made that run to the quarters. It’s been a lot of things slowly over time.”

Whatever “mainstream” really means, however popularity is quantified and despite the diffuse cultural and on-field ingredients that affect how the sport is perceived, growth will continue to be incremental: a process achieved through TV audiences, media attention, MLS attendances, star players, World Cup upsets and fans who have embraced a sport once derided as un-American as a vehicle for understanding and celebrating national identity and international diversity. And as a great excuse for a few drinks with friends.

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